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Thursday, April 18, 2013

`Real Emotion is Likely to Be Eloquent or Silent'

Sometimes
what is most important cannot be articulated in mere words, and some subjects
can be addressed only obliquely, without overt mention. This is not Zen
mumbo-jumbo. Language, like feeling and thought, has limits. Among them is
decency. Too much chatter can be an abomination. On Wednesday I spent two hours
with a retiring professor. He’s eighty years old and has taught at the
university for more than forty-seven years. His father was a sharecropper in
Strawberry, Arkansas. The professor remembered the time in 1936 when a
circuit-riding doctor removed his older brother’s tonsils, performing the
surgery in the family’s shack. The doctor left and the boy bled to death. “Afterwards
I’d see my mother sitting quietly, and I knew what she was thinking about,” he
said. “We didn’t talk about it.”

William
Plomer (1903-1973) was a South African-born English novelist and poet who worked
in publishing and edited the James Bond novels for Jonathan Cape. Ian Fleming
dedicated Goldfinger to Plomer. In
1976, Rupert Hart-Davis edited Electric
Delights, a posthumous selection of Plomer’s poetry and prose. In the essay “An
Alphabet of Literary Prejudice,” Plomer writes:

“Death
is the great evoker of cant and cliché. Memorial notices written by a dead man’s
friends have often revealed the poverty of their minds and emotions. Real
emotion is likely to be eloquent or silent; if it finds expression in flat or
trite phrases it seems, though it may not be, unreal.”